Hong Kong’s Airstar Bank completes cloud migration with Tencent

By Gloria Methri

Tencent Cloud has successfully completed the full-scale cloud migration of Airstar Bank, marking a significant digital milestone for Hong Kong’s banking sector. As one of the city’s first licensed virtual banks, Airstar Bank is now fully cloud-native, gaining enhanced agility, scalability, and operational resilience to meet growing digital demands.

Initiated in December 2023, the migration makes Airstar one of the few banks in the region to move its entire infrastructure to the cloud. After over 100 days of seamless cloud operations, the bank has reported substantial gains in speed, system stability, and security, positioning it to scale rapidly while optimising performance.

In partnership with Tencent Cloud, Airstar Bank adopted a layered architecture and advanced security measures, including business-specific partition isolation and robust threat protection systems. Edge security acceleration was integrated to optimise data retrieval, and real-time monitoring was enabled via Tencent Cloud’s observability platform.

Liming Hu, Vice President of Tencent Cloud, said, “Tencent Cloud is honoured to assist Airstar Bank in smoothly and efficiently migrating to the cloud, helping to provide more diverse financial products and services to customers, improve customer satisfaction, and promote a virtuous cycle that enables rapid business development. In the future, Tencent Cloud will continue to focus on FinTech and cloud services, offering leading digital banking solutions to financial institutions worldwide and supporting product and business innovation in the financial industry.”

Felix Tao, Chief Technology Officer of Airstar Bank, said, “As a ‘user-oriented’ digital bank, we remain committed to providing our customers with more diverse products and services. This development not only helps reduce costs and enhance efficiency, accelerating product iteration, but the flexibility and scalability of the new core system will also assist Airstar Bank in dynamically adjusting resources to meet future business expansion and peak customer flow demands. In view of all this, we strive to build a more agile digital bank supported by cloud technology.”

A critical component of the migration was a carefully phased approach to ensure minimal disruption. Tencent Cloud employed its proprietary DBbridge migration tool and workload evaluation systems to complete the database transition with a 100% success rate—no rollbacks or fallbacks were required. The disaster recovery architecture implemented includes a cross-AZ dual-active setup capable of second-level failover, ensuring continued service availability in the event of a system failure.

Post-migration, Airstar Bank can now tap into Tencent Cloud’s ecosystem of enterprise-grade commercial products to accelerate innovation and agile product development.